Tag Archives: IPA

The second beer that I ended up with because of HyVee’s evil Fuel Saver program was Deschutes Brewery’s Pinedrops IPA:

This beer pours a lot lighter than Fresh Squeezed IPA. Therefore, I would classify this as a more traditional IPA versus the emerging American Pale Ale style of beer.

However, the light body does not provide a good sounding board for either the alcohol (6.5% ABV) or bitterness (70 IBU). Perhaps it is from the wide variety of hops used— Nugget, Northern Brewer, Chinook, Centennial, and Equinox hops—or the general level of bitterness, but this beer leaves a lingering after taste that is not particularly pleasant.

It reminds me, unfortunately, of a lot of early craft beer IPAs that left you with the feeling of having drank some bong water with your beer. Those brewers were trying to mask deficiencies in skill by piling on flavors and aromas. Having drank well done beers from Deschutes Brewery before I know there is no need for these brewers to be hiding because the talent is present in the brewhouse.

Also, with a name like Pinedrops I was expecting a heavy, resinous profile that almost made you think you were breathing in the air of a temperate coniferous rain forest. Was that too much to ask?

At this stage of the craft brewing industry in America we expect more from our IPAs:

HyVee’s Fuel Saver program is the devil. You walk into the liquor store thinking you are going to pick up a fifteen pack of All Day IPA and instead you end up with something completely different because you saved $0.25 off per gallon of gas. This is how I ended up with two six-packs of different beers from Deschutes Brewery. In my defense, a total of $0.50 off per gallon of gas ends up saving me $10 when I fill up with the maximum of twenty gallons. Easy to do when road trip summers are here.

When Deschutes Brewery first came into the Iowa market I tried several of their beers and came away liking them in general. It’s been a while and I have not been tempted since for various reasons. The first beer I cracked open was Fresh Squeezed IPA:

I had passed this beer on numerous occasions, read the label, and thought that with a name like Fresh Squeezed it should have been a fresh hopped beer. Damn marketing.

The beer pours a darker amber color than most IPAs, which makes me consider this more of an American Pale Ale. What does that mean? Whatever marketing wants it to mean, but in general I think it means more malt and body than a traditional IPA.

All of this extra body means that the beer drinks a lot easier than its 6.4% ABV and 60 IBU would suggest. Being near the golden ratio—in my opinion—of ABV to IBU the extra body of the beer hides some of the downsides of having more bitterness and bite. It essentially mellows out the more extreme elements of the alcohol and hops. Fresh Squeezed is brewed with a combination of Citra, Mosaic, and Nugget hops. None of these really stand out as the driving element leaving the profile a little muddled or muted. Again, I was kind of bummed that this was not a fresh hopped beer.

In summary, you can do a lot worse in terms of mainstream pale ales and you ought to give Fresh Squeezed a try if you are looking to broaden your pale ale palate:

Revolution Brewing should be familiar to anyone who saw the movie Drinking Buddies with Olivia Wilde and Anna Kendrick. The movie was an unfortunate mumblecore mess for a lot of reasons, most notably that it did not really have an overarching story, but how would the beer taste coming from such a brewery.

Chicago is interesting compared to some of the other big cities in the region because it got a somewhat late start in the whole craft beer scene. Goose Island was a long time player, but it was about the only game in town until recently with the opening of Revolution Brewing and some others like Pipeworks Brewing Company. I guess people really did like throwing down cans of Old Style. Why, dear god, why?

On a recent trip to the Field Museum with my daughter I was able to make a side trip and pick up several six-packs of different beers from Revolution Brewing. First up is Anti-Hero IPA:

The beer is pretty balanced coming in at 6.5% ABV and 70 IBU. There is no single noticeable or overpowering hop notes, so this is not a beer that tries to grab you by the scruff of your neck and stick your nose in a bouquet of citrus. Smell the grapefruit, hipsters! I digress.

It’s an enjoyable beer, but it is not a memorable beer. It is my contention that to truly be a memorable IPA anyone you have to do something out of the ordinary. It says something about the evolution of beer in the U.S. when a slightly boozy and bitter IPA is nothing to write home to mom about. Then again, it’s not that you have to do something good to be memorable. Sometimes you just have to be colorful.

On the other hand this would be a beer that would be happy to have as your “go to” local six pack. Maybe this is the future of craft beer where regional brewers produce good beers for a limited geographical range and knock out some seasonal or special brews to coincide with local flavors or events.

In the end, it’s a beer you can be confident ordering in place of a freakin’ Old Style while you wait for the Cubs game to start:

One of the best things about my brother coming down to visit about every two months is that contained within his family’s minivan is a box or two with lots of Minneapolis beers unavailable to us in the great state of Iowa.

Indeed Brewing Company is a Minneapolis based brewery located in a hot spot of the fermentation arts with Dangerous Man Brewing Company being located just to the west and 612Brew a chip shot toward the University of Minnesota’s East Bank campus. Not too far away as well is Surly’s new flagship brewery, taproom, and event center. Founded in 2011, Indeed has a good local following for a series of different beers. Today we are going to talk about their Day Tripper Pale Ale.

Depending upon who you talk to Day Tripper is one of the brewery’s mainstay offerings and accounts for a great portion of the company’s sales. This is understandable since people want beers they can drink with their friends after work or in the fading light of a glorious Minnesota summer evening without getting blotto. Trust me, it’s easy to spend an hour or two on a patio in Minneapolis in July and forget that you have a thrown down three or four beers that would equal a half dozen or more Bud Lights.

At 5.4% ABV and only 45 IBU this is not a beer that is going to bowl over any hop heads or pale ale purists. Day Tripper is representative of two trends: session beers and American pale ales. I am a fan of more drinkable beers that have elements of a pale ale without hewing to the stylistic mannerisms of the IPA crowd.

It pours fairly light and also drinks fairly light. Like some other attempts at session IPAs Day Tripper Pale Ale does not really have a lot of interest in the body of the beer. In this case it reminds me a lot of New Belgium’s Slow Ride IPA. As a matter of fact, the two beers could almost be interchanged with little risk of offending the person being served:

“Session” beers are the rage. After spending what seemed like an eternity in the wilderness searching for flavorful, low alcohol craft beers I now have a plethora of choices. From the excellent Founder’s All Day IPA to New Belgium’s Slow Ride and on down the list there seems to be a new “session” IPA that comes out every week.

The trend seems to be to make lower alcohol IPAs, which is good because these recipes could stand to take it down a notch from eleven. Seriously, how many double and triple IPAs does the world really need? And how many of those double and triple IPAs can a person drink? It is tiresome to listen to beer snobs—like myself, mind you—prattle on about how they will not consider drinking a beer unless it is above a certain ABV threshold. It’s bro behavior in a hipster mask.

At 4.65% ABV and ~54 IBU this beer seems to have the bones for a good session beer. You will notice from the picture that it pours light and the beer drinks light. Described as a “fractional IPA” Day Time comes across lacking in any serious notable flavor. You drink one and there is little memory of the drink on your palate or in your brain. Could it be that Lagunitas created the “Coors Light of session IPAs?”

There is a little notable bitterness, but there is almost no malt body to give that bitterness some spine. It actually reminds me a lot of what New Belgium did with Slow Ride. In aiming for a broad appeal flavor profile the beer comes across as being bland. It’s not bad, just boring.

It’s surprising coming from Lagunitas because I am a fan of their more traditional IPAs.

At a rated ABV of 6.9% and an IBU of 75 you will be instantly hit with how drinkable this beer is given those decently lofty figures. Do you remember when a time when a beer at 75 IBUs would have been considered on the extreme end of things? I do. It was called the 1990s.

The trick with making Des Moines IPA so drinkable is that it has the perfect complement in a strong malty backbone. Unlike a lot of beers that sock you in the palate with a hop blast, this beer allows the body to mellow out the hop profile so that you can enjoy it rather than looking for a snack to cleanse out the bong water aftertaste. Note to brewmasters everywhere: Just as there is more than umami to a dish’s overall flavor excellence there is more than hops to a beers overall flavor excellence. Balance, dig it.

Confluence has only been in business since 2012 the brewery is putting out three year round beers with a selection of seasonal and limited runs. In addition to the glass growlettes Confluence is putting its beer in cans, which is good for all of us out there who want to enjoy a beer in a place where glass is forbidden and do not like the environmental impact of glass bottles. If Oskar Blues can figure out a way to make a “crowler” then every brewery should be on board with the canning movement. I totally want a local brewery to get one of these.

If you get a chance when you are in Des Moines—cut the Iowa jokes because this state is a great place to live and Des Moines has a lot of good things going on without a hipster quotient that will make you want to cry—visit the taproom near downtown. The area is pretty sweet with minor league ballpark nearby and some other decent bars—El Bait Shop anyone?—nearby if what is on tap at Confluence does not do it for you.

By the way, I am complete sucker for these little growlettes or apothecary bottles. Seriously, these are like the fuzzy bunny rabbits of packaging. Who does not like these little guys?

When you cut back on drinking beer you begin to curate your selection a little bit more because each bottle seems like part of a zero sum game. I did not give up drinking so much as curtail it down to a few bottles per week. Moderation if ever there was such a thing.

If there is one trend that has made it easier for me to stop brewing my own beer—never mind the entire drinking a lot less beer—has been the emergence of “session” IPAs. The adjective session has lost a lot of meaning in the past couple of years, which is no surprise given the wide ranging style differences that can occur under previously well understood definitions like IPA or stout.

New Belgium Brewery recently came out with Slow Ride IPA. It was debuted at Winter Park in January and made its national appearance soon after. BTW, New Belgium is now the official craft brewer for Winter Park. I think once craft breweries start becoming the “official brewery” of anything it means they are not really craft in the manner that many of us think.

Slow Ride is definitely a lighter IPA coming in at 4.5% ABV and 40 IBU:

Slow Ride uses Mosaic, a well known hop variety, and Nelson Sauvin, which I had never heard of until visiting New Belgium’s website. It’s a hop grown in New Zealand. A lot of the descriptors sound like “Sideways” wine guy words, but it seems like the main current of description is that it is a fruity hop that imparts white wine like notes. Okay, I’ll bite but it seemed like a pretty standard dry hop profile to me when I drank a couple of bottles. Call me unsophisticated. It won’t hurt my feelings.

Slow RIde comes close to the golden ratio of 1:1 ABV to IBU that I have been fiddling with for a while now. If your beer is 4.5% ABV it should be 45 IBU. It seems to hold true that beers like this are very balanced if the body of the beer can hold up its end of the bargain.

This is where I feel like New Belgium beers have really been falling down lately. The body of the beers has been lacking. You could say the beers are thin, but for a product that is mostly water even in the thickest instances it is not really the most appropriate descriptor. What is lacking is interest. Some beers have it, even if the alcohol and bitterness are not at stratospheric levels, and a lot of other beers do not. This is where true brewing talent shines.

Overall, this is a solid effort and if you want something easy to drink on a warm day that actually tastes like beer grab a pint of Slow Ride: